After spending nearly two-and-a-half years together, a NASA spacecraft will bid farewell to its asteroid companion Monday and begin the long journey back to Earth.
The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, and it carries a generous amount of material collected from the near-Earth asteroid Bennu.
Voyager 1—one of two sibling NASA spacecraft launched 44 years ago and now the most distant human-made object in space—still works and zooms toward infinity.
The craft has long since zipped past the edge of the solar system through the heliopause—the solar system’s border with interstellar space —into the interstellar medium. Now, its instruments have detected the constant drone of interstellar gas (plasma waves), according to Cornell University-led research published in Nature Astronomy.
Examining data slowly sent back from more than 14 billion miles away, Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell doctoral student in astronomy, has uncovered the emission. “It’s very faint and monotone, because it is in a narrow frequency bandwidth,” Ocker said. “We’re detecting the faint, persistent hum of interstellar gas.”
If you are a space enthusiast, there is some good news for you. In a new research, that could possibly open doors to many unknown aspects of the Universe, researchers have detected a resonant “hum” produced by the gravitational waves in the Universe. Experts say this can be imagined as a gravitational wave background of the Universe.
This hum of the Universe was reportedly detected by the North American Nanohetz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), and the findings of the research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
In a report, ScienceAlert said this gravitational wave background can be imagined as “something like the ringing left behind by massive events throughout our Universe’s history”.
Using neural networks, Flatiron Institute research fellow Yin Li and his colleagues simulated vast, complex universes in a fraction of the time it takes with conventional methods.
Using a bit of machine learning magic, astrophysicists can now simulate vast, complex universes in a thousandth of the time it takes with conventional methods. The new approach will help usher in a new era in high-resolution cosmological simulations, its creators report in a study published online on May 4, 2021, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“At the moment, constraints on computation time usually mean we cannot simulate the universe at both high resolution and large volume,” says study lead author Yin Li, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. “With our new technique, it’s possible to have both efficiently. In the future, these AI-based methods will become the norm for certain applications.”
15 years of radar measurements provide new information on planet’s spin, internal structure.
Venus is an enigma. It’s the planet next door and yet reveals little about itself. An opaque blanket of clouds smothers a harsh landscape pelted by acid rain and baked at temperatures that can liquify lead.
Now, new observations from the safety of Earth are lifting the veil on some of Venus’ most basic properties. By repeatedly bouncing radar off the planet’s surface over the last 15 years, a UCLA-led team has pinned down the precise length of a day on Venus, the tilt of its axis and the size of its core. The findings are published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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🔊 🔴 New sounds from Mars: NASA’s Perseverance Mars Rover caught the beats coming from our Ingenuity # MarsHelicopter! This marks the first time a spacecraft on another planet has recorded the sounds of a separate spacecraft.
🎧 🚁 Turn the volume up: go.nasa.gov/3h9RygT
Have you seen those plant trees instead of go to space memes recently? Well, aside from believing we can do both, I wanted to remind people what great things we use everyday due to the technological developments that the space race has spawned. Not least, the monitoring of illegal deforestation, but right through to better baby food, cleaner water and incredible digital cameras!! But that is not all, so here is my Top 10 technologies, that we have the space industry to thank for…